Carriers that grip the upper portions of articles to enable the articles to be lifted and carried are well known, particularly in connection with beverage cans. For example, plastic carriers which contain openings that fit over the tops of beverage cans so as to grip the cans in the area just below the can chimes are common. Although economical to produce, such clip-type carriers have a number of drawbacks. Because the plastic material is not biodegradable, the carriers are viewed as contributing to environmental problems. The thin plastic material which enables the carrier to be forced over the tops of the cans limits the weight of the package and can be painful to a person's fingers when the package is carried by the usual finger holes for any length of time. Further, such carriers provide no space for printed advertising material or other indicia.
Paperboard carriers have been designed for carrying beverage containers in similar fashion, that is, by supporting the top portions of containers so that the suspended containers beneath that point are unenclosed. One such design for carrying beverage cans utilizes a panel containing apertures through which the tops of the cans extend. The cans are held in place by adjacent support edges which engage the underside of the can chimes. Although paperboard carriers of this type provide certain advantages, such as being more comfortable to carry and being more environmentally acceptable, they provide no space other than the clip itself for advertising or other indicia and are not considered suitable for packaging all beverages. Certain premium beverages, for example, require packages that are more traditional in appearance, often being required to fully enclose the beverage containers despite the fact that such packages are more costly due to the amount of paperboard required to produce them. It would be highly desirable to be able to employ a clip-type carrier that does not suffer from these drawbacks.
Another problem in packaging articles, particularly beverage containers, is the high cost of changing from one type of carrier to another, which normally requires shutting down the operation of the packaging machine being used and starting up another machine. As a result, expensive packaging machines designed to produce a particular form of package often sit idle for long periods.
It would be beneficial to be able to change from one type of package to another with only minimum downtime and without requiring an investment in packaging machines which are only periodically used.